I thought that was the end of him, us, this. He had finished our last argument with a, ‘I will try to resist contacting you again.’ But, later, he sent something strange.
‘I am so very sorry, I was just crying out for some encouragement from you. I feel it is pointless to answer all your criticisms point by point. I want you to know that I will always love you and miss you.’
What does he mean, ‘some encouragement’? I had Save the Date for our Wedding cards hand-painted! I invited him for New Year’s Eve and all I got was a, ‘Why, what’s changed?’ followed by a, ‘Regards.’ So I reply: ‘You just kept disappointing me, David. I tried to build bridges at Christmas, but you shot me down. No wonder I emailed the Hunk.’
He tried to make excuses for not picking up the cat from Nic’s – car trouble, snow and ice – then said he would be away again for a week or so in April, so perhaps Nic should keep her until then. The truth is he was feeling thwarted, thinking collecting the cat would mean he’d get to see me. I added, ‘You wonder why people lose their rag with you? It’s because you keep doing stupid, thoughtless and selfish things!’
The day he was due to collect Pru, I locked my front door and hid in my bedroom with the puppies just in case he turned up uninvited. I kept thinking, well, this is ridiculous. Do other people get in such pickles, or is it just me?
In the end, he collected the cat, having left money for the vet bill for extracting her rotten teeth, plus some extra for her food. I felt a bit sorry for him, so I emailed him the following: ‘Let’s try to mend this. But you need to change, too.’
‘I would love the opportunity to do that. First thing tomorrow, I am going to buy a vacuum cleaner.’
He doesn’t own a vacuum cleaner???!!???
But still, I wonder how he got from, ‘Why, what’s changed?’ to, ‘I was just crying out for some encouragement’?
So I asked him. ‘Hey, Dave. I’m just curious and a little confused. Last time we made contact you attacked me via your mum, saying I’m “fickle”. Now you want to take me out for dinner and repair our “relationship”. Why the change of heart?’
He hasn’t answered. But who am I kidding? He is never going to change.
Here is the conundrum. I don’t want to accept this. I am not going to put up with a man who hasn’t lifted a finger to help me in what have been the worst four years of my life. He has created problems: abandoning me when he knew I lived in the middle of nowhere and had no car. Relationships should be fun, shouldn’t they? Full of laughter, companionship. Why on earth am I opening a chink in the door?
And so I begin to search my soul. Did I type, ‘Let’s try to mend this’ because of this column? I know, in my heart of hearts, that I got married because I was offered a column in a broadsheet about planning my wedding. That column only earned me £100 a week (so much for equal pay!), but it still propelled me into the arms of an entirely unsuitable younger man.
And if I contacted David to fill the yawning white space on this page, then that’s not fair on him. Or me. Just as I wondered, as I hid in my bedroom, whether what I was doing was ‘normal’, so I wonder whether I go too far to earn a ‘living’ (if you can call my subsistence that).
Have you read the other columns at the back of the glossy supplements? ‘In the morning I have an important meeting with my agent. He’s basically my manny and says I need to be at his office by 10am. It’ll be fine, I tell myself. Just one more £8 Jägerbomb!’ Or, ‘You know how pleasing it is when a stranger says “good morning” in the street, or smiles nicely…? A bit more of that wouldn’t kill us.’ The female columnist who penned that last bit was the one who called me a **** on Twitter! So how authentic is she? Does she rip her heart out every week, then press the ‘send’ button and wait, tin hat on, for the fallout?